Managing Contractor Safety: What Works in Practice

Wyatt Bradbury | Avetta

Jason Bacigalupo | Vimocity

Hello, everyone. Contractor work is a major part of today's utility and operational workforce.

Most organizations have strong systems to qualify and verify contractors, and yet safety leaders still face the same core challenge once work begins.

How do you maintain consistent safety standards across employees and contractors on the job site? Today's goal is simple, help safety and operations leaders understand what happens after contractor approval and what leadership behaviors make the biggest difference in creating alignment, consistency, and readiness in real operations.

My name is Jason Bacigalupo. I'm a senior performance coach here at Vimocity

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Vimocity, we offer a platform that helps safety and ops teams prevent common injuries by delivering expert-made safety content to workers across all the places they work.

With that said, safety performance is ultimately decided in the moment work actually happens. So let's hear from someone who manages that challenge in the real world every single day. Joining us today is Wyatt Bradbury, who brings a unique perspective from both the contractor management and safety leadership world. Wyatt works at Avetta supporting organizations focused on contractor readiness, qualification, and safety alignment. We're excited to have him help unpack what leaders can do once contractors are on-site and the real work begins. Wyatt, welcome.

Hey, thanks for having me, Jason. Excited to be here to talk to the Vimocity client network and some really awesome contractors doing really cool things around the country.

My name is Wyatt Bradbury, as Jason said, I work for a company called Avetta. I'm the principal of health and safety for Avetta, supporting a number of different initiatives, trying to help contractors improve their safety and health performance and finding better ways for clients to assess their contractor networks. My background is in construction. I've spent my whole career connected to the construction industry in some way, shape or form.

I also teach advanced safety engineering and management at the University of Alabama Birmingham. So really trying to advance the next generation of safety professionals. And then I also get the opportunity to help write some of the standards such as ANSI Z10 or Z490.1 that we use to govern our work and guide our work.

So excited to be here talking about contractor readiness and helping more organizations be ready to work no matter what that looks like.

And thanks again so much for being here, Wyatt. And with that extensive background, from your perspective, why has contractor readiness become such an important focus for safety and operations leaders today?

Yeah, so it's interesting. I've been kind of exploring this idea of what is the emerging workforce or the emerging way that work is performed. There's a couple of different ways to look at it. AI will give you a whole bunch of buzzwords. I like to use astronaut Gemini and I get all these buzzwords about what does it look like to do work in the modern era.

Another perspective is generations are shifting. So we've got a lot more Gen Z soon to be Gen A coming into the workforce.

Those are folks that have only grown up listening to Taylor Swift music. They've never seen Michael Jordan play basketball.

I think my own family, my brother was born after nine eleven. He doesn't know what the world was like before nine eleven. Just all these different things that are impacting people coming into the workforce. But there's also this other shift, which is how work is performed.

There's an increasing desire to outsource operations that's shifting a little bit politically, but there's still a need for it to outsource operations or to contract operations, bring in other people with different skill sets than your organization primarily has for a number of reasons.

Some of them are bottom line, some of them might be risk based or skill based. And so we're seeing this increase of contractors, this increase of outsourcing work. And in research that I've done using BLS data, so stuff that's totally available, contractors see outsized fatalities. There was ten seventy five contractor fatalities in the construction industry, which is a hundred percent contractors in some way, shape or form in twenty twenty three, which is the most among any individual sector.

And when we look at coming from the Campbell Institute of the National Safety Council, we look at employers under ninety nine employees, which are often who we contract to small medium businesses are utilized. Well, make up sixty three percent of all fatalities across the United States. So we've got this situation where because we've outsourced and because we've got so many contractors doing work, it's hard for us as clients or as host employers to really understand, assess and manage this idea of work is imagined and work is done because there are so many layers and that's something we're gonna talk about a little bit today, the layering of communications and the layering of risk and the fact that when you're a contracted worker, risk is so dynamic, you're not going to the same work environment, you're not doing the same exact thing in the same way every single day and so there's this constant need to be adapting which is part of a different risk profile that those workers face.

Yeah, and that risk profile and that challenge that you've outlined is is an interesting one and and makes me wonder, once contractors are hired and verified, what do safety and operations leaders often underestimate about what needs to happen next, especially from that standpoint of supporting safe and consistent work. I mean, if everything's changing all the time, consistency immediately from my mind bubbles up to the top as a key thing that we need to really be thinking about.

Yeah, and I think it kind of ties into where we just left off. This idea of it's hard to assess work is imagined, work is done, there's layers of communication.

And some of those layers of communication are increasing, I'm gonna say bureaucracy, a lot of people agree with me, but just increasing layers of management, increasing layers of people that are between those ultimately turning the wrenches in this case, your contractors and those writing the contracts or planning the work at the client And so it goes through an entire client organization, then it goes through entire contractor organization, then it goes out to the field through whatever field mechanisms exist. And so you just think that's a whole lot of challenges, almost like playing telephone in a supersized way with lives on the line on the other end.

And you gotta think then we layer companies, right? If you've got second, third, fourth tier subcontractors that are coming in. Now, you've layered the companies and you're repeating that. You're just, you're just kind of adding layers like a Smith Island cake, I think is the state cake of Maryland. Just add more and more and more layers to it with the frosting in the middle that just kind of gums it all up.

But it's also this idea of risk being dynamic.

If employees don't have the ability to manage the dynamic risk through whatever expected mechanisms or provided mechanisms are, then they're just gonna adapt to get it done because at the end of the day, the contractor is there just to get a job done, And so they're gonna do whatever it takes to adapt. And then we're gonna talk about some of the human performance elements later that will tie into this. And so it kind of begs this question.

If we often as host employers or as companies ourselves often have challenges, that's probably the best way to say it, setting up our own employees for consistent success.

When you extrapolate that to a contractor, think about what that means for them, right? If our employees aren't even consistently prepared and resourced, imagine what happens when even less is available, less information, less awareness might be available at the contractor level. And so I think there's this re understanding, re kind of alignment that needs to happen in our heads, especially as host employers as to how well we're setting those companies up for success and those employees ultimately up for success in the first place.

Yeah, and along those lines, as you think about what some of those, whether we call them root causes or defining factors, those opportunities for creating better alignment, you know, thinking about things like culture, communication, training approaches, again, and we're talking about different generations coming in, ways of working. What are some of those opportunities that you see where we can close the gap a little bit?

Yeah, think for me it starts in the host employer, whoever's doing the contracting itself, they have to have clear alignment in what they want to achieve.

I've seen so often being the one who's a subcontractor or where the prime brought in for a client to do massive infrastructure projects, I've been on those projects before.

It really starts with the contracts and the contractor management programs that are in place. You have to have a contractor management program. In your contract, it's not that it needs to be iron tight from this legal perspective, but you need to be clearly communicating the expectations, the standards, the laws, policies, the procedures that you expect folks to be able to work with. You need to be kind of stating what you need contractors and contractor employees to be able to know, what do you expect them to do?

And that can be not just performance of their wrench turning, I keep using that example, but also what do they need to be able to do performance wise? Do they need to have certain levels of education or training that need to be in place?

Do they have to be doing certain forms, JHA forms? Do they have to be doing certain permits? And start to think through what's even the taxonomy of language that you use in your organization that they need to know? Right?

How do you speak that they may not and you could be talking past each other using different terms because that's just how you operate. Where do your contractors get help? How do they engage effectively? Think about like SDS sheets, right?

Legally, you're supposed to provide anything that could affect that contractor employee, provide them an SDS sheet. They should be providing the same back to you. Where are you simplifying these processes? What are you doing for kickoff meetings, joint inspections?

And some of these last things I talked about, especially that kickoff meeting are kind of the second piece, second area that we really need to be unpacking this. And it's not just project manager, whoever at the client side to whoever the project manager is at the contractor, but it's really got to include some degree of line employee. They have got to understand what is going on. They need to have some awareness and they need to be involved to share their experiences.

Ironically, sometimes I found that the best conversations with some of my subcontractors were ultimately with those line employees, especially when they got it and the project managers at their companies didn't, it's like, well, I just wanna work with them anyway.

And think about it, if we extrapolate this even further, if you've got third, fourth, or even further down tiers of subcontractors, hold them to the same expectations, make sure that requirements are passed down to them, make sure that they're engaged in the same way. There's a kickoff meeting with them just because you may not have a direct relationship to them doesn't mean that there's not a need to make sure they're set up for success in the same exact way. Cause ultimately if something goes wrong, it's damaging your equipment or they're getting hurt on your site. Those are two of the worst case outcomes that we wanna avoid. So that's kind of how I think about opportunities for better alignment is we need to structure it better from the beginning and all parties have got to kind of come together.

Yeah, you hit on something there too. Mean, one, you were stepping outside just the contractual nature of whatever is we're doing, which, you know, it's like set the legal part aside, set the paperwork aside, you know, there's a practical element to this. And then beyond that, when contractors show up, ultimately, they're focused on trying to get the job done. That's that's why they're there.

And so then where my mind goes immediately is it becomes, and you touched on this a bit, but I'd love to unpack it a bit more. It really is, it turns into a leadership conversation.

And in your experience, what do you see strong leaders doing to create that alignment, especially when you've got this blended workforce? You've got employees. You've got contractors. You've got subcontractors. You've got multiple layers of things going on. So what does strong leadership look like? What are they doing differently?

Yeah, so I think back to organizations that really took this seriously. I think back to individual project managers, project directors who took health and safety in the contracted workforce very seriously.

I think it starts and this goes for any organization. So I don't think these are revolutionary concepts. I think we just need to think about how they apply in this idea of the contracted workforce with a modern workforce.

So it starts with having a very clear health and safety vision and that health and safety vision, cannot be like a target zero, that's meaningless, that's a platitude, but it needs to be a vision that communicates how we're going to execute, but it needs to be aligned to the organizational mission and both kind of get shared at the same time. So all efforts have to really align and tie back to that vision and the employees have to understand how their role affects the organizational or in this case, a project in many cases mission. So I'll give you an example, an organizational mission that I've used in the past or had to work under in the past was that we were focused on making sure that our trains on the Honolulu rapid transit system arrived on time. We were a mass transit solution that was there to make sure people could get to work and from work and where they needed to go on time. And we knew exactly what those metrics were that we had to maintain.

So that was the mission, but the vision that we used to get there from a health and safety perspective was legally compliant, audit ready and continually improving. And everything that we did in health and safety had a tie back into one of those three things. And those three things were the way that we enabled the organization to move people where they needed to go and make sure those trains were running on time. And if the organization to include employees, to include contractors don't have that clarity either because it's too muddled or it doesn't exist, then you're gonna have a really, really hard time.

And so that's kind of the first thing that we really need to be thinking about is vision and mission. I think from there, what I see people doing that's really cool is different forms of leadership training. So whether it's a health and safety leadership training that's deployed across the organization and deployed across the contracting network, whether it's some sort of contractor safety training, leadership training, this isn't your compliance stuff, this isn't orientation, this is a level above.

Think about how are we actually training, role playing, getting people to really dig into the concepts of communication skills. How do you have a health and safety conversation if you're a supervisor or manager with an employee? How do you have that without looking at a checklist, which is often what we tell them to do and make it something meaningful, not just, hey, thanks for wearing your safety glasses today. It's a start, I'm not knocking that, but it's gotta evolve deeper if we really are gonna make a difference.

So how are we training in communication skills, having safety conversations? How are we training risk management principles? How to actually identify hazards, control hazards? How are we training them to take ownership of safety and health? Because ultimately leaders own the safety and health. We just are there to aid as safety professionals. And whatever bar we set internally, we've gotta maintain for contractors.

A third thing I've got for, a third thing here is how are we looking at cultural evaluation?

So I was part of a project where from the client, they said that every year they needed a cultural analysis done on that project. So every single large JV within that JV there, and this is we're talking billion upon billion dollar project here. This is a massive, massive project that's gonna revolutionize transportation in Ontario, Toronto, but in Ontario, Canada, is that they every year had to go through and come up with a cultural evaluation and come up with corrective actions. And it was integrated. Everyone participated from the top of the project to the line employees, everyone was involved in that.

And the element of building a culture in that contracted workforce became a focal point of planning for that project. And I think that's important because your organization has a culture, you bring a lot of other people, other companies in especially on really large industrial projects.

How are you setting that consistent expectation measuring and establishing it? That's one of the ways and I absolutely commend the Metrolinx folks who established this practice because I haven't seen it elsewhere.

And that is one of the coolest things that I think is being done.

The last thing on this idea of leadership, there's a lot in leadership because leaders have an impact is how do we promote field supervisor opportunities to grow in health and safety? So at the supervisor level, how are we helping them? Think about the BCSP, Board of Certified Safety Professionals, their safety trained supervisor, safety trained supervisor construction program, where you're actually getting these folks certifications.

How are we getting more field employees OSHA outreach training awareness of hazards?

How are we trying to find ways to get leadership, field leadership, line leadership supervisors more involved, more aware, invest in them because we know that that's where the rubber meets the road a lot of times and that's who our contractor employees are interacting with more often than not.

So I think those are ways, there's a lot to unpack with leadership but those are some ways that I've really seen success and found value in utilizing leadership to improve the culture across and health and safety overall across the contracted network.

Love how you frame that. That that integration of the contractor into the culture and having that culture set and allowing the leadership to flow from that.

On the flip side, though, I'm I'm wondering too, like, where have you seen contractors raise the bar? And how can leadership spread, help spread those best practices across the broader workforce?

And imagine it can work the other way too.

Yeah. So I think more often than not clients are gonna need to start to step up and take the lead. I think that's where we're gonna be at. The large contractors are doing the right thing. They're establishing management systems. They're doing a lot of the things that I just talked about. I mean, I was a contracted entity brought in and we deployed a lot of this around our contractor network in a past life that I had.

But I think clients do need to take the lead. However, a lot of these things can also be done at contractor level, especially for the contractors that have resources. Look at the ASTM E2920 standard that was just published around SIF lagging indicators. So how are we measuring? How are we focusing on SIF?

Bring HOP into the work. So make sure that contractors have capacity to be able to do the work that they do.

A lot of times contractors are the ones that are setting traps, contract or finding the traps that are set in host employer.

They're finding everywhere that there's a condition that leads to error. They're operating with reduced margin. They're the ones that are finding the error provocative environments. So if you're a contractor going into a client space, show them that you know the HOP principles and help them maybe improve their safety and health function. If they're shame, blame, retrain, help them understand what a learning review or what a more comprehensive cause analysis will do.

And I think that's really important. So bring HOP into the work practically and use that to educate up where you don't have an opportunity to. I think build really engaging interconnected safety management systems, Make sure we're measuring business impact at the contractor level, not just measures of safety, busyness. I always did that as a cop out. I would come up with how to show how busy I was so that I could get people to leave me alone but that doesn't do anything.

It's a cheating practice. Find actual ways to again align to that organizational mission so that you can really show business impact. We talked about culture a little bit, establish many ways to measure your culture in your own organization. Look at leadership training opportunities within your organization, supervisor HSE development. We just talked about that. I think a lot of it comes down to as a contractor, you're doing innovation every day and really they're setting a tone. There's a lot more contractors than there are hiring clients in a lot of cases.

So how do you bring that adaptation, that innovation forward? How are you bringing that forward at your client safety summits that a lot of times you get invited to? How are you promoting that beyond just a contractor summit like AGC, Associated General Contractors? How are you bringing forward some of these ideas into the greater network of employers at more industry agnostic type events?

How do you really find ways to try to document and share feedback both ways? I think that's another great one where you're going through a project, maybe the host client isn't asking for feedback or isn't giving you what you need. Take that as an opportunity at job closeout to also say, hey, here's some things that you can do that'll make it easier for me or anyone else to do work for you. Here are some things that you can do that will also help keep your employees working in a lower risk profile.

There's a lot of those little kind of things around feedback I think that make sure that you say, hey, we see it.

Really the contractors do see it. Their employees are the ones closest to it. So how do we push that information back up to the client where they might just be so big they don't have the ability to know any better to go find it. So I think that's a kind of a cool consideration around contractors raising the bar.

And it sounds like part of embedded in what you're saying and you touched on this a moment ago is a contractor is naturally attuned to some of the, you call them, you know, kind of traps, I guess, because they almost have to be to meet the standard. But then it also sounds like what you're saying is that leadership at contractors need to be communicating in order to make sure that whatever innovations or opportunities that they're finding, that they're they're recognized and they're shared back upstream so that we're ultimately we're creating the safest possible environment for all. Is that an accurate representation?

Yeah, I think for too long, we've been operating with this mindset and it doesn't help with our legal framework, it doesn't help with the multi-employer citation policy and the litigious nature of society. All of those things are impacting this, but we've gotta get closer and closer towards partnership and we've gotta get closer and closer towards contractors and host employers understanding they are working in a shared space and they might be doing different tasks but they impact one another a lot more than they realize. And so we've gotta get to this idea. I'm not saying we need to have the co-located offices and we need to sing Kumbaya that I don't always buy into all of that myself, but we've got to understand that there's a lot more that brings us together than draws us apart.

And when it comes to health and safety, everyone needs to win in health and safety. We can't have health and safety be where the claims are or use that as kind of the wedge that we drive between us. That needs to be a unifying element is health and safety for us, health and safety for other employees, for the public, we can bring the environment in that needs to be somewhere again, going back to mission, going back to vision where there's some pretty good consistency, there's some pretty good alignment.

And I think that if we can do that early and we can do that often, it's gonna lead to maybe some of the softening and rhetoric that happens sometimes. And I actually think it's gonna allow for everyone to be a lot more successful.

Love that. Focus on what we have in common, not what we don't. And one of those things is making sure our folks go home safe.

Yeah, and there's so much, I mean, you gotta think of the combined resources of a client with their contractor network. Then think if you have many, many contractors, which most do, the combined resources together and the combined brainpower and the combined experience and safety and health, think about the experience, kind of the change in experience, the elevation, the opportunity that exists there. Think about how much more that is going to lead to success for everyone.

And think about what that can do in industry. Like that's how you start setting organizations apart. That's how you get the CEOs that NSC recognizes as the CEOs who get it. And that's how you start getting to that point where you've got contractors that want to work with you not just because you're big and you're a big name or just because you pay on time but actually because you're a good place to work and there's really good alignment.

And ultimately, we all need each other for success.

In any way you slice and dice or whatever metric you use.

So it doesn't really work to depend on one another but not actually collaborate and work together in safety and health.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Being siloed and trying to go toward the same end goal lead to the greatest outcomes.

Yep.

Switching gears for just one moment. One one other thing that, would love to get your perspective on is, you know, from the human side, you know, what human factors do do leaders need to plan for when contractors come on-site?

And how does that shape the way they set expectations, reinforce standards? Just thinking through all of those various human performance aspects or perspectives that get integrated into this standard?

Yeah, and I'll be brief with this one before we kind of go to our closeout, but I think the same HOP principles we use ourselves, we need to adopt with our contractor network. So if you're an organization that subscribes to HOP, human factors, you understand that the five principles of HOP, you need to make sure that not only are you looking at yourself that way, you're looking at your contractors that way. Again, we talked about this, the contractors are gonna be the ones that are gonna find all the areas where you don't have capacity because you're either reluctant to go find it yourself or you don't have the competency to look there. That might be why you have contractors. So again, we talked about where are traps set? Where have we created conditions that lead to error? Where have we reduced margin?

Where have we created an error provocative environment? Where are we giving employees only bad choices kind of going in the Todd Conklin vein of making bad choices versus having bad choices? All of those things we need to understand our contractors are gonna fall prey to just like our own employees. And so if we're expecting them to operate perfectly every single time, well, kind of look in the mirror first and make sure you're there and make sure that your organization's there, some will be, but many will not.

And so I kind of like to ask some questions on this, are you bringing in contractors to assume risk that you don't want your own employees to assume for some reason? And is it because, have you really given them conditions as contractors that are acceptable or as low as reasonably practicable? What are the conditions you're giving those contractors to work in?

And when things go wrong because of that, use it as a learning opportunity for everyone. Look at where maybe there might be gaps in some of the things that we've talked about today. Look at where the system or your work environment that you own might be needing some opportunities for improvement and how can we then maybe it is the contractor, maybe probably not, then how do we support the contractor in leveling up? And last of course, once we've exhausted all of that, that's where you start to look at people.

So I think those are just some different considerations. I take a systemic view and I always like to think that the physical work environment or the physical operating environment generally sets folks up for whatever error may be failure if we get there.

And so we need to start there and as clients, we need to take a little bit of ownership that maybe we don't always take. So if you're gonna follow HOP, you gotta follow it all the time. You can't pick and choose.

It's not a sometime thing. It's an all the time thing.

Wyatt, I know we're right at about time, but if you if you wouldn't mind, what are three quick takeaways that safety leaders can focus on to improve contractor readiness?

Yeah, so the first thing, I like to use the image of a crow's nest, right? You use a crow's nest because when you were on a tall ship, you'd go up to the crow's nest and allow you to see further over the horizon. So figure out what you need to do to get a broader understanding of the organizations that are in your workplace, that are contractors working in your workplace. Understand if you're a contractor, who are you working for?

What are those different entities? What does that look like? Understand the risk, who's doing the work? What are the communication challenges?

Start to unpack some of those principles from really early in our conversation today. I think the second one is that clear communication of mission and vision, make sure everyone's pursuing the same North Star, whether you're a hiring client, whether you are a contractor, there needs to be clear alignment on where you're going and then focus on what matters most, focus on those serious incidents and fatalities. There's a thousand paper cuts and a thousand twisted ankles, but at the end of the day, if we're diverting all of our resources to chase those, we might be forgetting and diverting away from that next fatality that's lurking around the corner.

So those would kind of be my three takeaways for folks today.

Thanks for that, Wyatt. And as we wrap up here today, everybody, contractor readiness isn't just about approval or compliance. The real work happens after contractors arrive when leadership creates the alignment that's necessary. And as we talked about, contractors have the ability to raise the bar when leaders create space for best practices to spread, and that consistency comes from expectations in communication and shared standards.

Wyatt, thanks again for sharing your perspective and your expertise. Really appreciate you making the time to join us today. Very, very informative. And just to let everyone know, if you'd like some actionable resources, go ahead and scan this QR code to get a toolkit that's gonna help you put some of these practices on contractor safety management into action.

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